Imperfect Alchemist Read online

  Until the year Mary turned fourteen.

  Ambrosia’s illness struck with no warning. Even when she was forbidden to leave their bedroom, wrapped in warm woollen shawls against the chill air that seeped through the windows punctuating the thick stone walls of Ludlow Castle, their parents insisted there was no need to worry. The family physician would identify and treat this ailment. Even when Ambrosia was confined to her bed, coughing and shuddering, Mary chose to believe her parents.

  Putting on a bright face so as not to worry her sister, Mary treated Ambrosia’s illness like a passing winter snowfall that would surely vanish come spring.

  The most beautiful morning of the newly budding season dawned almost too bright to be believed, the March sky promising a cerulean blue. After slitting their window open a crack to taste the air, cool as spring water, Mary closed the casement, returned to the bed they shared, and kissed her sister’s damp forehead. Ambrosia’s eyes flew open and she fixed her gaze on her sister.

  ‘Today is the day?’ But it wasn’t really a question, and her pale lips curved in a smile when Mary nodded, smoothing her sister’s straight, dark hair, such a contrast with Mary’s own unruly red curls.

  Less than three years apart in age, the sisters had always devised each day’s adventures together, well or ill. Even now, when Ambrosia could no longer rise from her bed. Especially today.

  ‘Where?’ Ambrosia’s voice was faint but insistent.

  ‘At the top of the Great Tower of the Gatehouse Keep, where he watches from dawn.’

  He was Jake, the bailiff’s son, sixteen and newly promoted to the Ludlow Castle guardsmen. Mary and Ambrosia had known him since childhood, sharing games of marbles and hopscotch during the months the family lived at the castle, while their father oversaw the border counties as President of the Council of the Marches of Wales. Now, Mary had decided to taste her first kiss, and had chosen Jake to bestow it. He didn’t know this yet.

  ‘When I arrive at court next season, once Mother finally deems me ready, I’ll be readier than she knows.’ Her chuckle sounded bright, bravado masking her qualms about joining Her Majesty’s circle. Her little sister couldn’t guess she was nervous if she wouldn’t admit it to herself. And Ambrosia needed something to lift her spirits, now more than ever. They both did.

  Ambrosia’s violent coughing interrupted their murmurs, until Mary held a cup of water to her lips. ‘Promise me you’ll come right back and tell me all!’ Mary leant close to catch the breathy whisper as Ambrosia sank back upon her pillow and closed her grey-green eyes.

  ‘Promise me you’ll wait patiently and listen to all of it,’ Mary demanded softly. ‘I’m not going through with this unless I have an audience who matters.’ She was rewarded with the glimmer of a smile.

  As Mary rose to go, Ambrosia was seized with another paroxysm of coughing. ‘I’ll stay. Jake can wait.’ Mary’s offer carried genuine relief. But Ambrosia shook her head.

  ‘You must live the story … before you can tell it,’ she murmured.

  ‘I’ll be back sooner than you think.’ Suddenly, Mary just wanted to get it over with.

  Clutching her skirts in her fists, she walked quickly across the courtyard from the household quarters to the Great Tower that topped the Gatehouse Keep of the fortified castle. She climbed the twisting steps quickly at first, then more slowly as her calves started to ache, marvelling that Jake mounted these steps every day. Rounding the last curve, she could hear the wind. Then she was blinking against the bright sun, catching her breath. The novice guardsman turned, surprised to see her, and smiled.

  ‘Come see the beauty of Wales, me lady,’ he urged, spreading his arms and wheeling in a half-circle to face the western horizon. The Shropshire countryside rolled westward into the Welsh hills in a vast panorama, alive with spring green. Jake’s voice was warm with the Welsh lilt Mary had come to love once she had learnt to make sense of it. It was the sound of his voice that had decided her choice, more than his floppy dark hair or startlingly blue eyes.

  Suddenly, looking into those eyes, Mary felt unsure. To give herself a moment, she gripped the cold stone parapet and peered over the edge, her coppery hair flying out behind her in the brisk wind. The landscape seemed more like a tapestry from the Great Hall than a real place, threaded with thin silvery streams and dotted with trees. No people that she could see, but then it was just past dawn.

  ‘Stop calling me lady, Jake. We’ve known each other for years.’ Mary tried to laugh, but shivered instead. ‘I didn’t expect the wind.’

  She felt a rush of vertigo – from looking over the lofty parapet, or from fear of looking at Jake? Swallowing once, she used the giddiness as a spur to action. Turning to him, Mary reached up, pulled Jake’s face to hers, and planted her lips on his.

  Startled, he began to pull away, but Mary’s grip was insistent and his mouth fixed upon hers like a bird dropping into a nest. When he closed his eyes, Mary kept hers wide open. She had promised Ambrosia to remember everything and report back. Her lips opened reflexively, and she tasted his tongue, darting towards hers. Abruptly, she released him, smiling stiffly to conceal the confusion that now flooded her. Her cheeks blazed.

  ‘Thank you kindly,’ she murmured, already considering how to describe for Ambrosia the oddly mundane sensation of two pairs of lips meeting.

  ‘You owe me no thanks, me lady,’ Jake’s face, too, was flushed, his expression quizzical, then anxious. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ With a final glance over the Welsh hills, now bathed in morning light, Mary turned and started down the curving stairway.

  That was when she noticed the wind carrying a disturbing sound. It was the high keening of maidservants.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Rose, 1573–74

  Mum returned home the next day, soaked in filthy river water but alive. When I ran into her arms, she knelt and hugged me, hard, and finally my tears burst forth, streaming down my cheeks and mixing with the water still dripping from her hair. Even Da wept dry sobs, while Michael bawled in Aunt Judith’s arms. But after Mum had bathed and dressed herself in dry clothes, we sat down to the midday meal Aunt Judith had prepared, as if all was well. The sharp cheese, the warm buttery griddle cakes and the tangy-sweet apple slices were comforting. I savoured the flavour.

  My parents sent me to bed early with Michael, but I could hear snatches of their speech.

  My mother, her words like a prayer: ‘Healing is my gift.’

  My father’s raised voice: ‘Witch is a name that lingers … You must never practise healing again, Joan, or … seal your fate and break this family for ever.’

  My mother again, too low for me to hear her words, but insistent, like the distant calling of geese across the autumn sky. Then my father’s voice like thunder, rumbling ominous warnings.

  When I brought Michael down for breakfast the next morning, the calm mother who had told me not to be afraid was gone. Now Mum couldn’t stop trembling. But not from cold. Nor from fear. My mother was the bravest woman I knew. It was anger that flared just behind her eyes. I could feel its heat.

  At my insistence, she reluctantly told me what had passed. She had been locked overnight in a farmer’s cellar, then taken down to the river at dawn in a procession headed by leaders of the angry mob. Two men, one of them the father of the child with the withered arm, rowed her out to the middle of the stream and threw her in. When she sank, she was drawn back to the surface by the rope they had bound her with and pronounced innocent.

  ‘I want you safe,’ she murmured now, stroking my wispy hair gently, although her voice was tight. ‘And I want you free of taint. The lady in the great house will teach you what I can’t.’ Her voice was low, but I could hear the flames burning her hopes to ash. And she wouldn’t look at Da.

  A fortnight later, I was sent to Wilton House – ten miles and a world away from Amesbury – to serve the Lady Catherine Herbert.

  By the time we reached the outer gates that crisp autumn af
ternoon, the cart that carried me from my home village had jolted over too many holes to count. The westering sun cast netted shadows over everything that passed beneath the towering trees that bordered the long drive. At the end of the avenue, Wilton loomed high and wide, no ordinary house but a great stone building that seemed to straddle the horizon. The cart finally stopped beneath a vast stone arch. My body ached as I clambered down and reached out my arms to catch the lumpy sack of belongings tossed my way by the burly carter my father had hired to deliver me. Catching his sympathetic smile, my eyes stung and I rubbed them hastily. As I shouldered my sack I felt its contents shift – the substance of my old life, now broken up and gathered piecemeal into a cloth bag.

  An imposing man was waiting for me, standing as erect as a soldier, dressed in blue and red livery trimmed with gold braid. He didn’t bother to introduce himself, just sniffed and led me from the entryway through a maze of corridors and down a flight of stairs to the servants’ hall.

  ‘Here’s the new girl,’ he snapped as we entered the kitchen, a stone-walled room with two huge, roaring fireplaces. Then he turned on his heel and was gone.

  A short, vigorous woman with plump cheeks athwart a prominent nose hurried across the room and took my bag from me. ‘That’s Master Wilkins, the steward. He’s more bark than bite. Sit down, lass, and have some supper. Cook Corbett has left a plate for you.’ As I seated myself at one end of the long table running down the centre of the room, she continued briskly, ‘I’m the housekeeper, Mistress Roberts, and I’ll have you settled in a trice. You’ll sleep in my room tonight. Cicely, she’s one of the chambermaids, will show you round the house tomorrow. She’ll introduce you to the folks who keep this grand place running. Once you know your way about, you’ll be ready to meet the mistress.’

  I was too nervous to eat much, but managed a few mouthfuls of bread and cheese before Mistress Roberts brought me to a flock mattress tucked into a corner of her chamber, warmed by a cosy fire. Crawling under the blanket, I curled into a ball around my fears, but dropped asleep at once.

  I awoke the next morning to an unfamiliar silence. At home the cocks’ crowing always roused me. Suddenly I missed those roosters more than I could have imagined. How could people sleep in such deafening silence? Mistress Roberts greeted me briskly and handed me a russet smock and kirtle, ‘to be getting on with’. A knocking at the door interrupted her description of the proper garments I’d soon be supplied with. ‘That’ll be Cicely!’

  She opened the door to a broad, sturdy girl a few years older than me, with a snub nose and eyes as blue as cornflower petals, startling under strong dark brows. Her face broke into an enormous smile when she saw me. ‘Thou’rt smaller than I thought, but no matter – ye’ll grow on Cook Corbett’s fare for sure. Come with me now, and we’ll get thee started on breakfast afore I show thee round, for thou hardly ate last night.’ Her warm voice was coloured with an unfamiliar lilt. At my puzzled look, she explained that marked her as a Yorkshire lass. ‘Don’t worry if tha miss owt I say at first. Ye’ll catch on soon enough.’

  I wondered how Cicely knew what I’d eaten, until I arrived at the kitchen on her heels. Cook Corbett, a tall, bony woman of few words but deft fingers, clearly knew who ate what and made sure that nothing was wasted from her stores. Wiping her hands on an impressively stained apron, she plumped me down before a plate piled high with golden fritters – apple slices dipped in batter and fried in butter. Suddenly, I was ravenous.

  That day, as my ears slowly grew accustomed to Cicely’s Yorkshire burr, she led me on a tour of Wilton House, introducing me to so many servants that I felt I had moved into another village, not just a house. ‘Two hundred, we are,’ she told me proudly. ‘Bigger than any other great house hereabouts.’ As we passed through the grand entry hall, I bobbed a curtsey before Master Wilkins, the steward, whose keen gaze still terrified me. We greeted the housekeeper more than once that day – she seemed to be everywhere. ‘Mistress Roberts may seem a bit starchy, but she’s the kindest housekeeper ye’re likely to meet in a lifetime of service,’ Cicely observed, moving me on as quickly and efficiently as, I soon learnt, she did everything.

  We made our way through the warren of Wilton chambers. ‘Follow the doors,’ she explained. ‘In one side, out the other, then all tha need learn is the order of the rooms, and ye’ll not be so flummoxed. I arrived only last year meself and had to learn right quick. Me mum knows Mistress Roberts, as she grew up not far from here, afore she married me da and moved north. So she sent me from Yorkshire all the way here, to earn me wages in service. Treat Wilton as a game, and ye’ll learn thy way in no time.’

  I hoped she spoke true. I tried to fix the rooms in my mind by the views from their windows – the long drive and alley of trees on the east side, to the west formal gardens with ornamental flower beds and sculpted hedges, a kitchen garden of vegetables and herbs off the north wing, wide lawns rolling down to the River Nadder to the south – but despaired at ever being able to move from one corner of the house to another without getting lost.

  Crossing in front of the stables that afternoon, on our way to pick some herbs from the kitchen garden for Cook Corbett, we ran into a sturdy young man whose hearty greeting lit Cicely’s face with delight. ‘Me brother, Peter,’ she explained. ‘Best lad in the household!’ His body, like his sister’s, was more compact than tall, with a core strength that suggested industrious labour. He nodded a bashful welcome, his eyes a darker shade of blue than his sister’s, but his smile just as bright.

  ‘No need to meet all the footmen and grooms, of course,’ Cicely explained earnestly as we passed through an oak-panelled room lined with imposing portraits. ‘Except for Toby Saunders, Sir Henry’s new valet,’ she added, as a young man in the now-familiar blue and red livery came into view. ‘Toby joined us only two months ago, after training in the household of milord’s brother, Sir Edward, and I must say he looks after milord very well.’ A blush rose in his pasty cheeks and his hands fiddled awkwardly with his cuffs. ‘And this here’s Rose,’ she told him with a smile, ‘just arrived in service.’ The young man barely nodded at me as his eyes slid away to fix on the chambermaid. Not that I minded. But those eyes troubled me – dark and unblinking in their focus on Cicely – and the smile on his face, so tight it seemed one tap would break it apart.

  Cicely continued her bubbling account of the various tasks of the household staff we encountered as we walked briskly along the passageways that connected the lofty Great Hall, a velvet-curtained library walled with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, too many bedchambers to count, and the solar, whose south-facing windows flooded the cosy, wood-panelled chamber with afternoon sunlight. Finally I covered my ears with my hands and groaned. ‘I’m happy for the introductions, I’m sure, but I’ll never remember all of this!’

  Cicely squeezed my shoulders reassuringly. ‘More fool me! ’Tis only thy first day – of course tha needn’t keep it all in thy head. Sit down with me in the kitchen, Rose.’

  It was a relief to sit at the worn oak table with Cicely and Mistress Roberts, as Cook Corbett set a plate of biscuits before us, crisp with such buttery sweetness that I closed my eyes happily. When I opened them, I saw that I was fixed in the unfriendly scowl of the scullery maid scrubbing the pots. ‘That’s Sarah,’ Cicely explained when we left the kitchen, ‘Sarah the Sour, we call her, cause – well, ye’ll see.’

  Before I knew it, Cicely was bidding me goodnight at the end of what felt like the longest, and busiest, day in my life. My last thought before sleep was that I was lucky to have Cicely for my first friend at Wilton. My first friend ever.

  The next morning, Steward Wilkins took over from Cicely. Without offering a greeting, he led me from Mistress Roberts’ chamber, my cloth bag of possessions clutched in my hand. Already I missed Cicely’s reassuring presence. If only I could have more time. But he was pushing open the door to the library.

  Seated beside a tall, arched window was an elegant lady with dark hair, pale cheek
s and sad eyes. She stood when the steward announced me, and her shiny green skirts rustled like the whispering leaves of the black poplar tree outside our cottage. I could see what looked like pearls stitched to the toes of her fancy slippers. I kept my eyes on the floor.

  ‘Welcome to Wilton, Rose.’ Lady Catherine’s voice was kind. The stones that had been lurching about in my stomach started to settle.

  ‘Yes, milady,’ I replied as Mum had instructed me, not daring to meet her eyes.

  ‘I was happy to take you when your mother sent word that you needed a place,’ she explained. ‘Joan and I joined paths as healers many years ago. I was only newly the mistress of Wilton House, and I needed another hand in treating some of the labourers when a course of pestilential fever swept the village. I know your mother’s skills.’

  At this my mouth dropped open and I looked up at her face without meaning to, then quickly lowered my gaze. My mother’s skills? That meant she must have heard the charge of witchcraft. Even worse, what if she hadn’t heard? Would she be angry at Mum for sending me once she found out? I started to shake, and my homespun bag slipped from my hand, spilling its contents across the richly patterned carpet. Flushing, I sank to my knees and began to scoop them up, the keepsakes I’d brought from home – an old rattle of Michael’s, new mittens knitted by my mother, the tiny bell I used to fasten to my kitten’s collar and a few sheets of paper. Lady Catherine interrupted my frenzy with a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said. The reminder of Mum’s words and voice was too much, and tears started to slide down my cheeks. As if she weren’t facing the most laughable excuse for a serving maid that she had ever seen, Lady Catherine extended an open palm.